


For Health and Strength

by lovetincture



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, Grief/Mourning, Missed Connections, Post-Episode: s15e20 Carry On, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-25
Updated: 2020-11-25
Packaged: 2021-03-09 18:56:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,602
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27711019
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lovetincture/pseuds/lovetincture
Summary: The most terrible thing about grief is the way nothing in the world takes notice of it. There would be some kind of justice if the world stopped. Here lies Dean Winchester, beloved brother and fallen hero. He drank too much and sang off-key, but he saved the world more than once. He kept his little brother tethered to sanity.Grief is such a messy thing.
Relationships: Dean Winchester & Sam Winchester, Max Banes & Sam Winchester
Comments: 7
Kudos: 38





	For Health and Strength

**Author's Note:**

> "We don't grow continuously or smoothly or even noticeably at times, but stumblingly, glacially, or at a gallop, without meaning to, or after great effort. We grow because life is growth and we love life not only as an idea, but compulsively, anonymously, in every cell and membrane." 
> 
> \- Diane Ackerman

Sam has lived through his brother’s death 114 times. Certain things get easier the more you do them—tying your shoes, working a moka pot, doing your taxes back when you still paid taxes—practice makes perfect. Surviving the feeling of having your heart yanked bleeding and raw from your chest, the death of the sun, the ruin of all things—that never gets any easier.

Still.

He has to find the children, those boys they sent into the raw night.  _ They. _ Even the word hurts. He gasps around it, clutches his chest like he’s been wounded. He wipes the tears from his face with a forearm. He has to find the kids, and he does, sooner rather than later. Stubby little legs didn’t take them far. He bundles them into the car and leaves them there, huddled and shivering, still clinging to each other. He tries not to resent them for their small comfort. He doesn’t manage it.

He has to take his brother’s body home.

It’s harder than it looks. The rebar went in at an angle, and he doesn’t realize it at first. He pulls, and nothing happens. He feels sick at the sound of squelching flesh. He feels something tear. Dean’s head lolls against him, and he finds it—finally he finds it, the right angle. Dean is heavy in his arms, one hundred eighty pounds of dead brother, and Sam thinks  _ he’s not heavy, he’s my brother _ hysterically.

It’d be good if there was something—a sheet, something. There are kids in the car. Boys who still have brothers, boys who don’t need a dead body rattling around their nightmares at night—but there’s nothing here but headless vampires and blood-soaked hay, and he’s not going to toss a vamp’s coat over Dean’s head. He’s just not.

He hoists Dean over his shoulders. It is what it is.

* * *

The most terrible thing about grief is the way nothing in the world takes notice of it. There would be some kind of  _ justice _ to it if the world stopped. Here lies Dean Winchester, beloved brother and fallen hero. He drank too much and sang off-key, but he saved the world a lot. He kept his little brother tethered to sanity.

The world doesn’t work that way, though, so nothing at all happens. There’s no fanfare, nothing to mark the passing of Sam’s whole world out of the rest of it. He drops the kids off at a police station and waits just long enough to make sure they get inside, then he burns rubber. He’s not in any hurry to explain the body in his passenger seat to a bunch of local cops.

He gets back to the bunker. He carries Dean inside. He doesn’t know what to do with him, so he lays him out on his bed. He fills Miracle’s dish and listens to him whine outside Dean’s door and drinks until everything fades into nothing.

He wakes up in the morning.

The waking seems like an injustice. He’d like at least a few minutes to pretend this is a bad dream, but he wakes fully lucid. He’s got a hell of a fucking hangover, but he knows exactly where he is. He knows exactly what happened. He knows exactly who he’s with—no one.

The halls are wickedly quiet, and it’s not like he’s never been alone here before—it’s not like this is  _ new.  _ It’s just the finality of it that kills him. Jack, Cas, Dean.

Dean.

He pretends they’re out getting burgers. He pretends they’re coming right back. He’ll be researching a case, and they’ll come in loud as anything, destroying his concentration and mussing centuries-old books with grease-laden bags. He goes for a run and resolutely does not— _ does not— _ think of the body laid out in Dean’s bedroom. He runs until his lungs and his limbs ache. He runs as far as he can get.

* * *

He thinks about ending it, of course he does. He thinks about it when he’s chopping carrots, the knife blade gleaming flatly in the light. He thinks about it when he cleans every gun in the bunker, methodically stripping them down and making them shine. He thinks about it as he hacks down pieces of dry wood for a funeral pyre, when the smell of charring meat fills the sky. He thinks about climbing right on up, fitting himself beneath Dean’s arm like he used to when they were both smaller.

He thinks about it. He doesn’t do anything about it.

He thinks about it on the drive down to Austin, the bunker nothing more than a memory in his rearview, Miracle’s tongue lolling out the windows. He thinks about it when he finds the pack—werewolves, run of the mill wolves that turn with the phases of the moon. He thinks about it while shooting one after another through the heart—thinks of how easy it would be to miss. Take a dive.

He doesn’t do it because he’s got no desire to go out that way. Werewolves don’t go to heaven, after all. He’s not sure Winchesters do either, but there’s no sense taking chances.

He doesn’t have some preoccupation with Dying A Good Death. That was always Dean’s thing. Sam’s not half as religious about it. Dead is dead. It doesn’t matter if you go out fighting something mean and toothy or eating your own pistol. It’s all bloody in the end.

So he thinks about it—sticking the barrel of his gun in his mouth. He’s thought about it before, in those years when he didn’t know what he was, what he might turn into. He thought about it more after he got the answer to that question.

He goes so far as to pull it out of his waistband and hold it, running his fingers along its mother-of-pearl handle. It doesn’t look just like Dean’s, but close enough. It could be his 1911’s brother. That used to be funny. He fits his hand around the grip and holds it poised over his lap for a few seconds too long. He sighs and tucks it back into the seat of his pants, sprawling out on a rented bed in another rented room—single room. One king.

Miracle paces the floor anxiously, and Sam shuts his eyes.

* * *

He thinks about calling Eileen. It would be impossible not to so much as think about it. She's his friend, or she was. There was a moment, a fleeting time, standing hand in hand, watching the water run down the skin of her still-wet body, spellwork crackling faintly in the light—there was a time when he'd thought that maybe they could be more.

_ They, _ there's that word again. Them, the two of them together: Sam and the woman he'd brought back from the dead. It was the biggest spell he'd ever worked. There was so much magic there.

He almost calls, pauses, thumb hovering over the send button.

But no, whatever they were meant to be, it wasn't that. They’d tried it on, and it didn’t fit.

He sets the phone down on the nightstand. It's not fair to her. There's a hole in his chest the size of the Grand Canyon they never did get a chance to visit, and Eileen deserves more than to be a patch for his leaking soul.

He never does call.

* * *

He takes it day by day. It's a stupid turn of phrase, and he'd punch anyone who suggested it, but there's no other name for waking up in the morning and going to bed at night and discovering that you haven’t died in your sleep.

He stays alive for the dog. He considers driving down to Kermit and leaving the dog with Amelia. He figures there’s a 40/60 chance she hears him out rather than shutting the door in his face, but he's sick thinking about it (sick on that and whiskey, one of the bottles he'd grabbed from the bunker on his way out—one of the bottles Dean had bought).

He stays away from Amelia. He keeps the dog. He drinks too much.

He prays to Jack, and no one answers. He prays to Cas, and no one answers. He talks to Dean.

He wouldn’t—couldn’t—call it praying. He talks to Dean the way he always has, telling him what he dug up on the latest case, carrying on his half of arguments that only happen in his head, ones whose scripts he knows by heart. He drinks too much and sometimes cries and calls Dean a selfish bastard, hollering up at the sky, scaring the neighbors.

No one ever answers.

* * *

He runs into Max completely by accident. He keeps taking cases, more out of a sense of inertia than any deep sense of righteousness. They’d saved the world again and again, him and Dean. (There’s that word again.) There’s a witch gone rogue in South Dakota, dropping bodies in her wake, and Sam gets there just as Max is wrapping it up.

“Hey there, stranger,” Max says, glancing up as if he doesn’t have his hands wrist-deep in chicken guts. “Long time no see.” He pulls his hands out of the unmoving carcass and makes a face, leaving bloody handprints on the cheery yellow dish rag hanging from the oven handle.

He squints at Sam’s face.

“You look rough, man. You want to get a drink or something, catch up for old time’s sake? On me.”

The habitual denial is right at the tip of his tongue. Sam’s gotten good at turning people down. Socializing—it’s not something he really does anymore, but.

Alicia isn’t here. It strikes him in the knees. Max is alone, just like him. It’s the only thing that makes him work to unstick rusty vocal cords, voice shabby from disuse.

“Yeah,” Sam hoarses. “Why not.”

They wind up at a place that Dean would never have been caught dead in. Something light and poppy plays from the overhead speakers. The whole place is evenly lit, brightly atmospheric. College kids in tight pants and young, well-dressed professionals loiter around the pool table, playing a shit game. People sit at raised, round tables, leaning into each other over $12 drinks.

Everyone is so young, and it makes Sam feel ancient.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” Max says, looking as young and slick as everything else in this bar. “I was sorry to hear about Dean’s death.”

“Yeah,” Sam says, because there’s nothing else to say to that. He takes a long swallow of his beer.

“How are you holding up?”

“Fine,” Sam says automatically.

Max peers at him. “Really? Because you smell like what would happen if a truckstop bathroom had a baby with a liquor store. Be straight with me. How are you really?”

Sam laughs humorlessly. “How do you think?”

“That bad, huh?”

“You have no idea.”

One drink turns into two, turns into three, turns into Max pulling Sam off a barstool and pouring him into a waiting subcompact.

“A cab, really?”

“It’s called a Lyft.” He nudges Sam with his shoulder. “I know you still go in for that old school macho hunter crap, but some of us don’t want to die young and pretty.”

Max doesn’t mean anything by it, but it hits Sam like a lead weight to the gut. He feels suddenly so out of place in this sleek car with backup cams and a working air conditioner and a hybrid engine that doesn’t make a peep. This is the new world, and he doesn’t have a place in it. He feels like a relic, a dinosaur. A fossil left over from another era.

If the driver thinks anything of it, two men sitting close in the backseat, he keeps it to himself.

They glide over silent streets, deserted the way only the suburbs can be at 11 o’clock at night. Tears start leaking out of Sam’s eyes at some point, silent and unremarkable. He doesn’t bother trying to brush them away. He’s too drunk and tired—too alone to bother feeling ashamed.

If the Lyft driver thinks anything of that, he doesn’t mention it either. Max is content to look out the window, close enough for Sam to feel in the radiant heat of his body but not close enough to touch. Sam watches mailboxes and lawns go by.

He expects to be dropped off outside a motel. Maybe Max will invite him in—that seems to be where the night is headed—and maybe he won’t. Either way, he plans on walking back to the bar. His car is there  _ (his _ car, horror of horrors), and he doesn’t want to leave it overnight. He imagines a dozen horrible things that can happen to a classic car.

He’s surprised when they pull up in front of a duplex that looks just like all the others, neatly trimmed lawn with a navy mailbox right outside. He’s surprised enough that it jars him momentarily out of his funk.

He raises his eyebrows. “Where are we?”

“Home sweet home,” Max says, a hint of a sigh in his voice. “C’mon, we’re paying by the minute.”

Max is already out of the car, and Sam follows after, aware he’s gaping. He closes the car door gently behind him, following Max’s lead, suddenly hyperaware of the neighbors  _ (neighbors). _

“You live here?”

“Sure do.” He fishes keys out of his pocket and unlocks the door, casting a glance over his shoulder. “Not what you pictured?”

Sam shakes his head.

“You thought it’d be witchier?”

He did. But also, “I didn’t know you lived in town.”

“There’s a reason I beat you to that hunt.”

“Guess so.” Sam falls quiet. He isn’t good at this anymore. Max doesn’t seem to mind, hanging his coat on a rack by the door and motioning for Sam to do the same.

Max’s house is cozy, clean and tidy and smelling faintly of incense. It’s warm when Max turns on the lights, lit with a buttery, incandescent glow. There are throw pillows and blankets slung over a comfortable-looking couch, and the floor is lined with rugs in coordinating colors. It’s all so inviting. Sam doesn’t know what he’s doing here.

“Coffee? Tea?” Max calls from somewhere out of sight.

“Uh, coffee,” Sam says. “Thanks.”

He knows how this goes. It’s been a while, but he’s grieving, not dead. They’ll talk, trade stories. Sit close together on the couch sipping their drinks, drift closer together as the night wears on. There’ll be a hand on a knee, a solicitous, inviting smile. No one here will push. There could be comfort here.

He’s out the door before the coffee finishes brewing. He’s embarrassed by his reaction, but not enough to turn back around. He half expects Max to follow him, to come outside at the sound of Sam leaving and ask what’s the matter.

He doesn’t. It wouldn’t be fair for Sam to feel disappointed by that.

Sam walks the half hour back to the bar. Ten minutes in, the storm clouds that have been threatening all day finally break. The rain comes down in sheets, pelleting him and soaking through his shoes, plastering his hair to his head. It’s sobering, so when he takes Dean’s baby home for the night, he barely swerves on two-lane residential streets.

He soaks the seats, but it’s fine. He’s alone, but it’s fine. He might have just lost a friend (does he still have those?), but it’s fine. Dean’s gone, but

He’s got to feed his dog anyway.

**Author's Note:**

> Say hello on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/lovetincture), if you feel like it.


End file.
